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Thanks to a proliferation of new technologies – big data, social media, the rise and rise of artificial and machine intelligence – the world of work seems to be changing too fast for us to keep up with. Should we be worried? This is the driving question behind The Wealth Of Humans, a new book from Mr Ryan Avent, senior editor and columnist at The Economist. And, let’s not beat around the bush, the answer is: yes, we should be. In fact, the early effects are all around us, reflected in a world that seems, both politically and economically, rather unstable.

“I think the digital revolution will be as transformative to the way we live and work as the industrial revolution was,” says Mr Avent. “The transformation will be a long one, but it has begun in earnest over the last couple of decades. That, to me, helps account for a lot of the economic and political oddities we now face, from rising inequality and sagging wage growth, to political dysfunction and a backlash against elites and elite institutions.”

In the book, Mr Avent backs up such thinking by taking a deep look into the problems and opportunities currently affecting the world of work, from the global labour glut and how it might be managed, to the the factors affecting growth in emerging economies. With the benefit of Mr Avent’s expertise, and extensive research on economies around the world,  it becomes clear that, though a digital revolution is inevitable, it’s not at all certain how society will adapt to it, particularly because so many of the issues tied up with work in the modern age – education, immigration, housing, globalization – are influenced by the slow-to-change values of political parties, and also, unfortunately, because elite communities have a habit of restricting access to themselves.

What can we do, then, to prepare ourselves for the coming changes in the workplace? Ultimately, Mr Avent suggests, we may need to reassess many of the ideas about work and wealth that we currently hold dear. But there are also some key ways in which businesses and employees can future-proof themselves a little bit. We consulted Mr Avent to discuss a few of them.

Central to Mr Avent’s thoughts on the future of work is the idea of “social capital” – that is, the working practices that make companies like Apple, or Google, so valuable, despite the fact that a lot of their manufacturing work (of, for example, the iPhone) is outsourced. In the future, says Mr Avent, the value of a business will not lie so much in what it does, but how it does it – the social structures that are in place within a company that make it repeatedly produce successful ideas and products. “Culture, or social capital, is the set of behaviours that shape how that information is exchanged,” says Mr Avent. “Highly profitable firms have evolved cultures that are exceptional at processing information. This shows when you break down their valuations: buildings, machines and salaries account for less than a fifth of the value of big American companies. The rest is ‘dark matter’, much of which boils down to the know-how that makes a company tick.”

The importance of social capital in an automated world means that, as employees, our value will lie less in building on specific skillsets, but being adaptable, and, more importantly, being able to synchronise the social values of our workplace. This throws the emphasis on a range of more general abilities. “Conscientiousness matters,” says Mr Avent, “but so do more basic things like critical thinking, ambition and an eagerness and ability to learn new things. Flexibility is important, because things aren’t going to be done the same way 10 years from now as they are today. The main thing to note is that interpersonal skills matter. That is true whether one is a plumber, hoping to generate a good reputation score on Yelp, or a software engineer working out how to motivate one’s team.”

Businesses will need to be adaptable to face the digital revolution, but there is a risk of making missteps if strategy, and therefore a company’s culture, is dramatically reinvented too often. “Culture can’t simply be rewritten,” says Mr Avent. “It has to be hacked, in a way: bosses have to tweak incentives and hope that the way those tweaks change behaviour delivers the desired ends. Bosses have to be willing to jettison their favoured way of doing things when those things cease to work. They also need to recognise that constant large-scale course corrections, like major shifts in firm strategy, are often self-defeating. You have to bring the culture along with you.”

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power And Status In The 21st Century (Allen Lane) is out now